Jacob Torrey: Bootstrapping an Architectural Research Platform

Over the next few weeks we’re going to announce the 44CON talks and workshops. Don’t forget to get your tickets!

Our next announcement is Jacob Torrey – Bootstrapping an Architectural Research Platform

This talk aims to provide the fundamental architectural knowledge and resources for a security research interested in misuse of the x86 platform to conduct their own research with less “boiler-plate”. Covering the privileges and architectural events that different CPU rings can monitor, a few basic research hypervisors, and new technologies coming into the mainstream; this talk will aid researchers to rapidly focus on the research questions and not the setup.

Jacob Torrey is an Advising Research Engineer at Assured Information Security, Inc. where he leads the Computer Architectures group and acts as the site lead for the Colorado branch. Jacob has worked extensively with low-level x86 and MCU architectures, having written a BIOS, OS, hypervisor and SMM handler. His major interest is how to (mis)use an existing architecture to implement a capability currently beyond the limitations of the architecture. In addition to his research, Jacob volunteers his time organizing conferences in Denver (RMISC & BSidesDenver) and regular meet-ups across the front range.